# Paying for Searches You Were Never Going to Win

> When Google Ads is set up loosely, part of the budget goes to people looking for your competitors, for products you do not sell and in places you do not deliver to.

Canonical: https://thegrowthproject.com/blog/paying-for-searches-you-cant-win/

## Results

- **⅓** what each dollar on the search ads earned, compared with the main campaign
- **1 in 6** ad visits came from places the store could not deliver to

_One ecommerce store, measured before the rebuild._

**Field note from an ecommerce store.** On the surface, the Google Ads account looked fine. Most of the budget ran through one main campaign, with a smaller set of search ads running beside it. Those search ads were where the money was leaking: each dollar spent on them earned about a third of what the main campaign earned.

## What we saw

The words the store had chosen to advertise on looked sensible. The searches Google actually showed the ads for told a different story. Google had stretched those words to cover searches for competitors' shop names, and for products the store doesn't sell. Every one of those clicks cost money, and almost none of them could ever turn into a sale.

The second leak was location. Google's default setting shows your ads to people who are in your area, or who have simply shown an interest in it. The store only delivers to one region, so about one in six ad visits came from people it could never deliver to.

## What we did

- Told Google never to show the ads for competitors' names, or for products the store doesn't sell.
- Rebuilt the search ads around a short list of specific searches, each one sending people to the page that sells that product.
- Changed the location setting so the ads only show to people inside the delivery area.

## What changed

The same budget now reaches people looking for things the store sells, in places it can deliver to. The lesson applies to any business running Google Ads: **check what people actually searched, not just the words you chose.** The words you chose are what you asked for. The searches are what you paid for.

This is one of the first checks in our [Google Ads audit](/growth/google-ads-audit/).